It was mid-late 2001, and we had just gotten dial-up in our house. Lousy ISP, Surferz; pretty much impossible to load anything after 6 PM because the servers were overloaded. Still, I would procrastinate from doing schoolwork by AltaVista-ing (I'm not sure I'd even heard of Google at the time) Mario stuff all day. There were, of course, plenty of Angelfire sites that played Culex's battle theme as soon as you opened the page, but a few sites stood out from the rest. TMK was one of them, along with SMBHQ, NintendoLand, and World-of-Nintendo.com; and TMK quickly revealed itself to be the best Mario site out there. SMBHQ was close, especially back when NC was updating (I remember seeing most of the Bill & Fred series when they first came out), but nothing could top TMK. Especially once NintendoLand stopped updating and World-of-Nintendo.com shut down.
Now I'm going into nostalgia mode... I remember JJ answering mailbags, and then the guy that wrote a poem that compared JJ to "a pregnant woman who forgot to take her Midol"; I remember SMBHQ's hiatus; I remember back when Luigi in SM64 seemed somewhat feasible...
I remember following the name changes from Mario Story to Paper Mario Story (and Deezer pointing out the acronym, even though I didn't know what PMS was at the time) to just Paper Mario; I remember when the Dolphin was called the StarCube; I remember seeing pictures of the 100 Marios demo; I remember the sheer awe at the first screenshots of Melee; I remember when I first saw screenshots of Luigi's Mansion, I said "How are they doing these graphics? It can't be polygons, they're too smooth!"
For some reason, though, I didn't join the Fungi Forums until 2006. Although I think I may have joined before that, but then forgot both my password and the email address that I signed up with before even making any posts, and didn't get around to making another account for a while. Shame, too, because I can't fully appreciate
this.
